Does the GOP Have a Message for 2012 Besides Anti-Obamaism?

Conservative columnist David Frum asks the question that forms the caption of this post in a column at The Daily Beast. Frankly, the answer is no, there is nor forward looking message. At best, the GOP goal seems to be to drag the nation backward in time and not in a positive manner. Just look at the GOP assault of birth control being led by Rick Santorum and the Christianists in the GOP base. This reality is also reflected in the GOP agenda in the states such as the extremism being seen in the GOP controlled Virginia General Assembly. For every Obama initiative under attack, the GOP has no real counter proposal other than a reversion back to policies that have either created the current mess in the first place or which would throw the poor and needy under the bus. Here are highlights from Frum's column:

The economy is improving. Talking Points Memo presents two charts that depict the improvement vividly. These trends put paid, I think, to last year's Republican message, "Obama made things worse." Maybe Obama did, and maybe Obama didn't. But the worst seems definitively behind us, recovery is quickening, and this election—like most elections—will be about the future.

President Obama has stated his vision of that future. It is a future in which the emergency government activism of the first term hardens into a more permanent fact.
Here's the president in Osawatomie, Kansas, in November 2011:

Yes, business, and not government, will always be the primary generator of good jobs with incomes that lift people into the middle class and keep them there. But as a nation, we've always come together, through our government, to help create the conditions where both workers and businesses can succeed.

Of course, those productive investments cost money. . . . We have to ask ourselves: Do we want to make the investments we need in things like education and research and high-tech manufacturing – all those things that helped make us an economic superpower?

To some degree, that Kansas speech was intended as a clever framing of the November 2012 ballot question: investments that might benefit the middle class vs low tax rates that primarily benefit the rich.

Yet the speech was more than just an electoral gambit. It also revealed some core presidential convictions and suggested the main priorities of a second Obama term:

* Allow the Bush tax cuts to lapse;

* More government spending in hope of stimulating well-paid jobs either directly in the public sector or in private-sector firms that will depend on government contracts;

* Move to budget balance primarily through higher taxes, but also through some unspecified reforms in Medicare.

It's a coherent program. That is not to say it will succeed. . . . Whatever the Obama program's faults, however, it is a positive program. A Republican program that emphasizes "repeal" and "undo" is not a positive program. It's not a future-oriented program either: it's a program to refight the battles of the past four years, hoping this time to win the fights that were lost last time.

The gap will especially glare in the area of healthcare. If President Obama is re-elected, near-universal coverage will become a fact—a cludgy and expensive fact, but a fact. If President Obama is defeated, the promise of universal coverage will be withdrawn, to be replaced by ... what? The country is still waiting for that answer.

An opposition party challenging a president who can claim a record of economic recovery cannot afford to leave the country waiting. Anti-Obamaism won't suffice in 2012. So what is the answer to the person who worries: "A vote against Obama is a vote to give back my health care coverage. What will your team offer instead?"

Frum hits the nail on the head. We know what the GOP and its reality denying, ignorance embracing base doesn't like. But what would be done to truly move the nation forward? So far, the GOP has only espoused things to move the country backwards while the rest of the world is moving forward.